After we were confident that we understood exactly the signal that the picophage returned upon pinging, we started looking for signals that were being sent to the picophage devices.
"You know," Tabitha commented, "what we have done here is good SIGINT work even if it was with alien technology."
"Well I would agree partially, Tabitha," Anson said. "But it is a little more, really. I would say it was MASINT since we weren't just detecting the SIGnals INTelligence, but we also had to do some Measurement first And then do some SIGnals INTelligence."
Whatever Anson or Tabitha wanted to call it, we were putting some well-learned human traits to good use.
Finally, after day twenty-two we had it. Anson called us into the makeshift lab in the Phoenix where he and Sara had detected a signal from an exact location within Lumpeya City the Grays had pinpointed. That had to be the device's location and we now knew exactly where it was. These facts really amazed and frightened the Grays. They had apparently been trying to find this thing for more than six thousand years with no luck. 'Becca pointed out to them that their slave scientists probably weren't really motivated in the right way to help them. Then she told them about flies, honey, and vinegar. It was completely lost on Feyibi and Atalas and Yiaepetoes, but Prawmitoos seemed to ponder the story. Perhaps it didn't fall completely on deaf ears.
Occasionally, Tatiana and I would talk for limited, small amounts of time. I missed her terribly. The wait between conversations wasn't as bad for her since she had taken to putting herself in suspended animation in order to conserve her strength and life expectancy. Oxygen wasn't a problem since the nanomachines could convert the carbon dioxide that she breathed out right back into diatomic oxygen very easily and practically instantaneously. The warp armor belts only had minimal air supplies since we expected to use them in a breathable atmosphere. All that was normally needed to replenish the air would be a quick lights-off lights-on maneuver. We had planned for them to be used as emergency spacesuits but that was for limited periods of time and the air supply limitation was counted in minutes, not days.
Food and water were Tatiana's biggest problems. We calculated that the nanomachines could reutilize her clothes and weapons; her urine, feces, and sweat; and the food and water that were in her stomach, and any excess body fat and muscle over and over (at the body's typical ten percent efficiency) for about a year before there was nothing left of her but vital organs. If she had to she would use her hair first, then her breasts, then her fingers and toes and her earlobes and ears, her eyeballs, then her hands and feet, then her arms and legs, until there was nothing left. So we only allowed ourselves a minute a day for quality time together. It was hard thinking about what she was going through and that she was trapped there this way, but she was intent on staying alive no matter what it took. She had a year before she had to start in on her hair. That had to be enough time. The total gruesome calculated time that she could stay in there and still be fixed when she got out was pushing a hundred years, about twice that if we stopped talking until we got her out. But Tatiana told me that if she had to stay there that long without talking to me, she would end it now. We didn't have that conversation again.
Fortunately, with our rapid download capabilities I could fill Tatiana in on a full day in a matter of microseconds, and then spend the rest of the minute telling her how much I loved her.
Tatiana told me a few days after I had downloaded her the specs for the picophage detection system that she was working on an idea for getting out. She knew she was wasting energy that she might need sometime in the future, but she said she was only allowing herself an extra minute a day for this—which would cut her year into six months. She told me several times that she didn't have a need for legs and arms in that damned bubble. I cried all that night and had that image stuck in my head. It was Jim and 'Becca who came around and pulled me through the depression. I also had Mike keep tabs on it for me. He assured me that I was perfectly normal and that he was sad, too.
Ten more days passed and we were prepared for our journey. We planned to take the Phoenix to Lumpeya City. The Teytoonise drones had fixed the quantum fluctuation drive and so it would be able to make the trip a third of the way across the galaxy in just ten or so days. Tabitha asked Prawmitoos if he would give Annie, Sara, and Al a ride back to the edge of the quarantine zone and drop them off there in the Einstein. He had a science drone ship do this. He told us that he planned to come along to Lumpeya City with us. We argued with him about it for some time, but the Gray finally put his foot down and said that this would be the only way he would allow the Einstein to return to Earth space. Anson stepped in and told him that he had a deal
Finally, we were on our way to meet the Lumpeyins—or at least Opolawn. Once we were aboard the Phoenix and on our way at a million times the speed of light, Prawmitoos took me aside when nobody else was around and he touched my forehead.
You hear me, human?
Yes, alien. What do you want?
This is something that you might need. He palmed two small medallions made of a flintlike stone to me. One was a grayish color and the other black.
What are these and why are you giving them to me?
You have the Servant and understand its mechanisms quite clearly. I think you could use this best. It is FUER. Your people have yet to develop this technology, but I give it to you now with hopes that you will understand its potential applications. It is what you might mistakenly call elementary particles.
When he thought it and spoke it the word sounded like a drawn out "fuyer" and sounded almost exactly like the way that Anson says the word "fire" in his slow Southern redneck drawl. He downloaded the instructions to me and I realized that it was a serious weapon, one which worked similarly to a nuclear bomb. If you forced the two rocks together hard enough, like striking two flint stones, you would create sparks. If you really slammed them together it would release tremendous amounts of energy, many hundreds or possibly thousands of times greater energy than a nuclear device. FUER was a Latin acronym for fugitivus unus elementum retineo. Fugitivus translates to something like a fugitive or runaway slave. Unus means one and only one. Elementum is the first principle or basic constituent. Retineo means constrained or confined. Put it all together and you get something like fugitive one and only one basic constituent confined. It rang a bell with me and I was sure it would with Anson, Jim, or Tatiana. The best I could gather was that the rocks were crystallized arrays of quarks.
Single quarks didn't exist as far as I knew until that moment. Quarks are the basic constituent of matter and always come in twos or threes—never one and only one. The gluon force required to keep the damned things together gets larger the harder you try pulling them apart. In other words, quarks are attached in such a way that they can't be pulled apart because it would take a near infinite force to do it. I say infinite just because humans have never figured out how much energy it would take. Oh, there are theories, but nobody has ever figured out how to do it. Obviously, Prawmitoos had figured out how to free some quarks, capture the free ones, and confine them in some type of matrix. He was giving me a couple of chunks of the stuff.